


The Ability to Want

by lovetincture



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23110318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Yennefer isn’t in the practice of lying to herself—never learned how, never cared to—and she is not a selfless woman. Tissaia is a bitch, and she can’t be dead because Yennefer needs her. Death isn’t an option for either of them. She won’t allow it.Yennefer and Tissaia find each other in the aftermath of the battle.
Relationships: Tissaia de Vries/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 17
Kudos: 167





	The Ability to Want

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished watching The Witcher last night, and all I can say for myself is that I ship these two so hard.

Tissaia de Vries is a fucking bitch.

She might also be dead. If Yennefer were in the practice of lying to herself, she would say that Tissaia must be alive because she still has so much to offer the world. She has young girls to guide (to ruin) and a Nilfgaardian army to hold back, for they’ve turned them away once, but this is nothing more than borrowed time. That Tissaia continues to draw breath is a net positive for humanity; she could even manage to say it with a straight face.

But Yennefer isn’t in the practice of lying to herself—never learned how, never cared to—and she is not a selfless woman. Tissaia is a bitch, and she can’t be dead because Yennefer needs her. Death isn’t an option for either of them. Yennefer won’t allow it.

So she digs through the ruins, pushing bodies aside to look for a familiar flash of red hair, a smirking mouth. Her lungs burn with smoke, and she tears her fingernails on stones. Everything is in ruins. Her peers lay strewn on the ground around them, broken dolls with their parts dashed to bits, blood leaking from unseeing eyes or a nose that breathes no more.

But Yennefer staggers through the chaos because scores of mages are dead, but Tissaia must not be one of them.

Force of will can only get you so far. She knows that better than anyone. Eventually she collapses.

* * *

If this were a story, she’d wake up in a sick bay somewhere. They’re living the aftermath of a brutal and bloody stalemate, so she wakes exactly where she fell, on the battleground where her strength failed her. There’s a heavy weight pressing upon her, and she shoves it off, grimacing when she’s unable to do more than budge it. The weight makes a sound, a soft protest.

Yennefer jerks back to get a good look at her. Tissaia slumbers, slouched over her on the ground. She’s so still that Yennefer might think she were dead if not for the sound she’d uttered. Even now she’s cold, her breath barely detectable. Yennefer has to hold her ear close to Tissaia’s mouth to hear the quiet wheeze of breath.

They’re in a bad way. The battlefield is scorched around them, and there are no signs of life. The magical fog in the air has been joined by a thick layer of black smoke, the two combining to blot out the sun so that Yennefer has no idea how long they’ve laid there. It could be minutes or hours. More soldiers will come, surely. They might be nearly here.

They need to move. She can barely lift her arms.

“Tissaia,” she says, wincing at the pain of it. Her throat is in tatters, her voice little more than a ruined croak. She shakes the older witch. “Tissaia, we need to go.”

For a second, Yennefer fears she won’t wake. She doesn’t know what she’ll do then, the two of them kitten-weak on the ground, waiting for certain death. It’s an intolerable fate. The burning unfairness of it gives her the strength to struggle upright, though she can barely lift herself. It’s an effort to push herself to sitting, enough that it leaves her dizzy and ill. There’s no way she’ll be able to carry Tissaia too.

A yawning chasm of hopelessness beckons her, opening its gaping maw.

She’s relieved beyond relief when Tissaia opens her eyes. She blinks, her gaze distant and unfocused, but Yennefer will take it. She’ll take anything at this point. She doesn’t examine the bone-deep rush of gratitude she feels. There’s simply no time.

“We have to go,” Yennefer says. “Can you stand?”

Tissaia’s voice comes out a croak, but it’s a damn sight better than Yennefer’s. “I should ask the same of you.”

Yennefer scowls. “I’ll manage.”

There’s really no place for cattiness here. Any attempts at bravado are as flimsy and insubstantial as air. Yennefer swallows what little pride she had left in the attempt to get them both up and moving. In the end, they have to lean on each other, clawing themselves upright against the other’s slight frame.

It’s strange to think of Tissaia as _slight._ Nothing about her has ever seemed small in Yennefer’s life. She has always loomed large, something to live up to, or to beat. Not so now, as they cling to each other and stagger into the treeline. The forest offers so little protection as to be almost no protection at all, but it’s something. Yennefer is rapidly learning to adjust her sights downward—in this moment, they’re not dying. In this moment, they are sheltered from prying eyes.

It’s enough because it must be.

They stagger as far as they can, dropping unceremoniously to the forest floor when they can walk no further. They’re shaded by boughs of trees, leaning against the trunk of a great oak. Yennefer leans her head back against it and closes her eyes. She’s cold all over. The sweat on her brow picks up the chill, and she wishes she wore something other than a gown to a war.

The corner of her lip tips up of its own accord.

“What is it?” Tissaia asks.

Yennefer looks at her, rolling her head with great effort. “What are we wearing?”

A stunned silence follows, a look of incredulous disapproval on Tissaia’s face.

She cracks at the same instant Yennefer does, the both of them dissolving into inappropriate giggles. Yennefer laughs until she’s sick with it. They sound like dying mules, and every second feels like knives in her lungs, but she’s endured worse.

They truly are ridiculous.

“Can you make a portal?” Yennefer asks when their laughter has petered out, leaving nothing but an eerie silence in its wake.

“No. Can you?”

Yennefer reaches for her magic, for the deep well of chaos that lives within her, burning in her breast as long as she can remember. She comes up empty-handed, finding nothing but a dull, hollow ache.

“No.”

Tissaia thumps her head back against the tree. Yennefer doesn’t miss the grimace that flits across her features.

“That’s not good,” she says with her eyes closed.

“Fuck.”

Tissaia is unmoved by her outburst, conserving energy, perhaps, or maybe she’s passed out again.

Yennefer studies the side of her face, the gentle slope of a fine nose, white skin cut with delicate lines between her brows, around her lips. Tissaia de Vries is a fucking bitch who turned Yennefer’s friends into eels (and she helped).

She’s still so beautiful. Yennefer idly wonders how much of her beauty was there before and how much was magic-made. She wants to see the ugliness that lurks beneath, mourns that she never got the chance. It’s delirium, maybe. It isn’t love.

If asked, Yennefer would say that her ability to love had been cut out by the Brotherhood, along with so many other parts of her tossed aside over the decades. Casualties to war and power. Her ability to feel, though. Her ability to want—those still work just fine.

Tissaia is so still that Yennefer could believe she’s merely asleep. Yennefer can’t hear her breath at this distance, but she refuses to check for signs of life. She won’t give Tissaia the satisfaction twice. Yennefer was a fool to think she could be killed anyway. She’s too cruel, far too heartless. Death has no reason to want her, not like Yennefer does.

She leans over, emphatically not checking for a pulse, close enough to smell her. She smells like fire and death, the same as everything else around them. Yennefer presses their lips together.

It’s a question, a curiosity. Tissaia tastes like smoke and salt. She tastes like metal and mortar.

This isn’t a fucking story. She doesn’t come alive under Yennefer’s touch, doesn’t bring her arms up to circle Yennefer’s neck in a passionate embrace, but she does kiss back. She doesn’t turn her away. Her lips part, and their tongues meet, and it feels like a childhood dream. Yennefer recalls a story of a little girl lost in the woods, seeking the fairy queen’s favor.

But there are no little girls here. No innocents, no one who _deserves_ to live. Only two bitches too stubborn and mean to die. Only two witch queens, tired beyond sleep and wounded beyond help.

She couldn’t say who ends the kiss first. They lean their heads together and rest slumped under their tree, waiting for destiny to come find them.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
